>> Considered as software failures, both of these occurred in application code and were not the result of programming language deficiencies.

Was the code not written in a programming language?Even if it was written in assembler, that too isa programming language. I expect that the bugoccurred because the programmer did not realize thesemantics of the code.

>I don't find Mathematica to be especially mysterious relative to its capabilities.

Mathematica the language is, I think, relatively mysterious. The application underneath it adds both capabilities and extra mystery.>>>

>> (RJF) I would hope you would be very aware of the Ariane 5>>>> and similar disasters.>> I am aware of those, as well as many that you've never heard of.

How would you know that I don't know? Are they secret?

>> Not all bugs are of equal importance. An error of 5.5E-79 in a Bessel function is very unlikely >to cause trouble in a practical application.

One of the marvels of computing today is that it is possible to do so much in such a short time.One can execute billions of instructions a second. If onlyone in a million does the wrong thing, and is wrong onlyby a tiny percent, you can accumulate a whopping mistakein a second.

I've been using Mathematica to do practical work since version 1, > and I've never encountered a bug in its numerics.

I guess I disagree on this point.>>> This is pretty far afield from the original question which I>>>> think was somehow...s Mathematica somehow Lisp-like.... should I learn Lisp...>> I'm unusual in that I write practical engineering code in Scheme (a Lisp dialect), > along with code for both science and engineering in Mathematica.

I think that is unusual, but I count it as a good thing. ThoughCommon Lisp (a Lisp dialect) is used in space computations --the Hubble telescope. For more applications, seehttp://common-lisp.net/~dlw/LispSurvey.html

...>> Programming language specialists have many interesting ideas, > but lousy judgement when it comes to which ones are important >in any particular application context.